NEW YORK (AP) – James Kane has used a powerful magnet to fish all manner of junk from New York City waterways, but he said the stacks of USD100 bills he pulled from a safe were something else entirely.
Kane’s girlfriend, Barbi Agostini, was recording last Friday as he pulled a slimy safe out of a lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, famous as the location of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, and extracted bags of waterlogged, gunk-covered Benjamins from inside it.
“Oh, that’s money,” Kane said in the video of the discovery. “Oh, it is! Stacks of bills, dude!”
“Oh, my God!” Agostini said.
The couple estimates that the safe contained as much as USD100,000, though the bills were partly decomposed and stuck together.
The bills featured the 3D security ribbon that indicates recent vintage, but the safe bore no clues to a rightful owner.
Kane and Agostini said they called the police to report their discovery and were told there was no evidence of a crime.
“They gave it to us, as, I guess you call it a finders keepers thing,” Kane said.
The New York Police Department’s public information office said in a statement that “the value and authenticity of the alleged currency” could not be determined due to its “severely disintegrated condition.”
Kane is far from the only magnet fisher who has made a mark in recent years.
A magnet fisher found a human skull padlocked to an exercise dumbbell in New Orleans last month. Someone fishing in a creek in Georgia in April pulled up a rifle and some belongings of a couple who were killed nine years ago.
People who dabble in the hobby heave long ropes into the water attached to powerful magnets, some capable of staying latched to objects weighing 907 kilogrammes. They drag the lines through water and muck, hauling up objects that would likely go unfound by a beachcomber with a metal detector.
As magnet fishing videos rack up views on YouTube, skeptics grumble on Reddit that some of the finds must be fake.
